THOMAS - Piano tutor - New York
1st lesson free
THOMAS - Piano tutor - New York

THOMAS's email address and phone number have been validated.

THOMAS

  • Rate $46
  • Response 1h
THOMAS - Piano tutor - New York

$46/h

1st lesson free

Contact

1st lesson free

1st lesson free

  • Piano
  • Keyboard
  • Synthesizer

Learn Piano with Thomas, Whatever Your Age, Goal, or Starting Point! Lessons for all ages

  • Piano
  • Keyboard
  • Synthesizer

Lesson location

    • At THOMAS's house: New York

    • online

    • at your home or a public place : will travel up to 80 mi. from New York

About THOMAS

I teach piano mainly through the ear, and I use the body to explain what the ear is telling us. Almost every problem at the keyboard shows up as a sound before it shows up as a feeling: a note that comes out thin, a phrase that rushes at the same spot each time, a chord that blurs when the pedal goes down. So in my lessons I often start by asking you to listen to two versions of the same passage, one that you played and one that I play, and to tell me what is different. You do not need the vocabulary for it. "The second one sounds like it's leaning forward" is a perfectly good answer, and it usually points straight at the problem. From there we look at what the hand and arm did to make that sound, and we change one thing at a time until the difference is clear to you. I think of this as teaching you to hear your own playing as information rather than as a verdict.

A typical lesson with me is less a list of exercises than a few small investigations. Suppose you can play a scale slowly, but the moment you speed up, the thumb crossing turns into a little stumble, and the phrase loses its shape right after the tuck. I would not ask you to repeat the whole scale a hundred times. I would have you play only the three notes around the crossing, then the same three notes with one note added before them, then with one added after, until we find the exact note where the sound starts to fall apart. Once we know that moment, the practice becomes precise. Often the fix is not speed or effort at all but the direction of the arm, or a decision to let the hand stay quiet while the thumb moves. You will leave with a specific problem and a specific way to test whether it has been solved, which is far more useful to you than another round of general repetition.

The same principle looks different depending on where you are. A complete beginner might spend the first lessons learning what weight feels like: I have you drop the arm into a single key until you feel the bottom of the key, then lift and notice how the sound changes when the arm is heavy versus when it is just resting on the key. Children often respond well to a simple game of deciding whether a note is a rock or a feather, which is really a lesson about release and control in disguise. A returning student who has not played for years usually knows more than they think, so we might start with a piece they once loved, reduce it to its bones, meaning the bass line and the main melody with the middle filled in only where needed, and rebuild it from there. With an advanced player, the same listening habit becomes a question of voicing: we might play the melody with the top finger alone, then with the whole hand, to find where the tune is hiding inside the chord. With a teenager or an adult who wants to play a particular song, I often take the chord progression, build a left-hand pattern that fits it, and then add the melody once the hands are comfortable separately. Rhythm is practiced apart from pitch, too: a single repeated note, tapped with the rhythm of the tune, can reveal coordination problems that a full passage hides.

What I care about most is that you leave each lesson able to do part of the work without me. Before we finish, I usually ask you to name the one thing that broke and the one thing that improved, and to describe what you heard. Over a few weeks you begin to notice your own warning signs: the rushed bar before a hard leap, the pedal that gets pressed too early, the shoulder that rises just before a fast run. When you can catch those moments yourself, I know the lessons are working. I am not interested in students who depend on me to hear every mistake. I would rather you learn to listen closely, test one idea at a time, and recognize when a passage is ready to be trusted.

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About the lesson

  • All Levels
  • English

All languages in which the lesson is available :

English

Most of my piano lessons start with a comparison rather than an exercise. If you bring a piece you already play, or a melody you have only just found, I'll ask you to play one short passage two ways that differ in a single thing: how the fingers arrive at the key, how long you hold one note before the next, or where the weight of the arm falls. Then we listen. You tell me which version sounds more like music, and what you noticed in your wrist or forearm when it did. A beginner can usually hear the difference between a note that is pressed and a note that is placed within a few minutes. An advanced player who has lived with the same nocturne for years often hears something new in the same way. The method stays the same, and only the thing being compared changes.

A frustration I hear often is this: you can play the left hand alone at a comfortable speed, and the right hand alone too, but the moment they meet, the bass drops out or the melody starts rushing ahead of it. I usually treat that as a timing problem before a finger problem. So we separate rhythm from pitch. You might tap the right hand's rhythm on the edge of the keyboard while the left hand plays the actual notes, then swap, then play both hands with the rhythm of only one of them. This exposes which hand is leading and where the other one is hesitating, which is usually invisible when you play everything at once. With a young child I turn this into a game with the lid of the piano and a drum-like tapping, and with an adult returning after years away I might reduce a whole chord progression to its bass line first, so the harmony has somewhere solid to stand before any decoration is added. The reason it works is that your hands stop competing for attention and you can hear each part on its own.

Memorization is where many students get stuck, especially returning students who learned a piece long ago and now find it has quietly slipped away. Instead of asking you to memorize blindly, I help you find landmarks: the spot where the harmony changes, the note at the top of each phrase, the bar where the left hand moves to a new position. I also like to reduce a difficult piece to its skeleton, usually the top line and the bass with a handful of notes per bar, play that until it feels like a story, and then rebuild the detail around it. If the piece falls apart, I don't want you to keep playing from the beginning. I want you to stop at the first note that goes wrong and work out why. Often the trouble is only the two-note transition before it, and once that is isolated and played slowly enough to hold, the rest of the passage tends to follow. You learn to recognize the exact point where things give way, which is far more useful than hoping the whole page will improve on its own.

Improvisation is where I push the independence I want you to build. Instead of "make something up," I give you a small set of limits: five notes, only the black keys, a fixed left-hand pattern while the right hand wanders, or a rule that every phrase must end on the same note. These limits feel restrictive at first, but they force deliberate choices, and you start to hear why one phrase feels finished and another doesn't. Every exercise I give you is meant to lead quickly into real music, so a technique from Monday's lesson might show up in a song you're learning by Friday. My hope is that you leave each lesson with two things: a piece that sounds better than it did, and a clearer sense of how to find and fix the next problem without me in the room. If that sounds like the way you want to learn, I'd be glad to hear what you're working on.

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Rates

Rate

  • $46

Pack rates

  • 5h: $230
  • 10h: $460

free lessons

This first lesson offered with THOMAS will allow you to get to know each other and clearly specify your needs for your next lessons.

  • 1hr

online

  • $46/h

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All languages in which the lesson is available

English

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This first lesson offered with THOMAS will allow you to get to know each other and clearly specify your needs for your next lessons.

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